


the divine alchemy of the self

by redstorms



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alcohol, F/M, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Trans Character, talk about death and gardens and family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:55:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26152273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redstorms/pseuds/redstorms
Summary: missing scene/alternate party from season 6 where Raven and Murphy drink in the tavern together. they talk.
Relationships: John Murphy/Raven Reyes
Comments: 8
Kudos: 25
Collections: The t100 Writers for BLM Initiative





	the divine alchemy of the self

**Author's Note:**

> Set in s6/s7, an alternate canon where Raven talks to Murphy about his drinking & their shared pasts with alcoholic/abusive mothers. Rated M, maybe? Can be heavy on the angst, humorous, soft/sweet, an argument/confrontation - whichever or toss it ALL in there! And even throw some hurt/comfort in if you want! Somehow it leads to a mutually wanted kiss though, potentially more...
> 
> prompt from t100fics-for-blm.carrd.com
> 
> anonymous can have a little trans!murphy, as a treat

“Hey,” says Raven, sliding into the chair across from Murphy at the tavern. He was staring pensively into his glass, swirling it around gently, as one does, but now he’s staring at her. She had gone to that party that was happening, for the naming day or whatever, and she’s wearing a dress that someone lent her. It’s some little red number, hits her just above the knees, and it looks good on her. Everything looks good on her. She’s _Raven._

“Hey,” he says, easy with it. Easy with her, always. “You have fun?” he asks, and lets himself visibly check her out, eyes raking over her body. It’s meant to be a joke, between them.

She rolls her eyes. “It was loud and the lights were kind of a lot,” she says. “You drinking?”

Obviously. “As much as I can,” he says, and braces himself for a reprimand.

But she says: “Pour me one?” instead.

“Sure,” he says, amenable to this twist, and he holds the pitcher between them and flourishes out an extra glass from the stack by the end of the table. The alcohol here is amber-colored, almost golden, and it tastes like apples that have reached their truest and best form and also maybe gone a little bad. Smells like apples, too.

“Don’t you have, like, a —“ Raven waves a hand over the glasses, the pitcher, the drinks.

“A party to go to?” Murphy guesses. Bellamy helped him pick out something nice. Emori went. But he didn’t — he thought about it, but he couldn’t, in the end. Sometimes that’s just how it is, you know?

“I was going to say,” says Raven. “a bad history with alcohol.”

Murphy snorts, because it’s true. “Worse history with algae,” he counters.

“I was just thinking,” says Raven, and she takes a sip from her glass. “About Harper, and how she had the same disease as her dad.”

Murphy is brought up short by that. He hadn’t — expected it. “My dad’s dead,” he says, too quickly. Oh, yeah, he’s affected by it. He takes another sip of it, like it’ll help instead of making it worse.

“Your mom.”

“…also dead,” confirms Murphy, not sure where she’s going with this.

“Shut up,” says Raven, but she’s smiling a little, so she doesn’t mean it. “You told me about her.”

“Yeah,” agrees Murphy, because Raven is familiar with that whole sad story. “She drank a lot. It killed her.” A summary. “Guess it’ll kill me soon.” The rest of that tale.

“Thought you were afraid of death now,” says Raven, referring to, you know, his whole mental breakdown where he was officially dead for a little bit and relived all his worst traumas. Re-died? Instead of relived? It’s not important.

“I’m trying to at least sleep tonight,” he counters. “You want me to wake you up again?”

“Asshole,” says Raven, but she’s fond with it. “Maybe I’ll wake you up first.”

The thing about their dreams — their nightmares — is that they’re very different, but their screams both sound the same. Hers; ragged at the edges, screaming just to hear herself make noise, impossible not to release. His; deeper, maybe, hoarser, because he wakes himself up with them more often, so his voice is thicker, but. It’s the same thing, really. She’s hit him when he wakes her up too soon, he’s done the same thing to her. They’re both familiar with that pattern.

She gives him a little smirk, like she can tell what he’s thinking, and takes a full swig of her drink. It makes him a little angry, that she’s read him so easy, so he’s aiming to injure her when he says: “Didn’t your mom also sell you for this?” A wave. This glamorous life of alcoholism.

“Tried her best,” agrees Raven. Sometimes memories are so painful that they become worn with time, lost their sharp edges. It doesn’t mean they don’t hurt any less to carry, but maybe it means that they become easier to bear. “You know I had Finn.”

Murphy swallows from his cup, and it burns going down, and his eyes hurt, just from the mention of him. “Yeah,” he says. “And then I had Finn, and now we got nobody.”

Raven finishes her drink. “If you’re going to be like this,” rude, stupid, _you know just how to hit where it hurts most, don’t you, Murphy_. “then I can leave.” She starts getting up, making good on her promise.

“Don’t,” he says, and he’s aware how desperate he sounds, how pathetic. “ _Don’t._ ” He just — even if it would just be to upstairs, if she is going to abandon him, if another person abandons him — _fuck —_

Raven settles back down, easy. “Then pour me another,” she says.

Murphy pours her another one. She looks at him instead of her glass, and he is — more afraid of that, than he would like to admit. His face feels hot and flushed, maybe not just because of the alcohol. She’s always making him feel like this. “I was just thinking about how we’re more like our parents than we’d like to admit.” He hates wherever this is going. “Looking at Jordan, I —“

“I hate him,” Murphy interjects, surprised at how much emotion is in his voice. “I _hate_ him. He’s not worth it, he wasn’t fucking worth it, he’s just this — _baby —_ who can’t do antything right for himself —“

“Hey,” says Raven, gentle, even though there are people stopping to look at them, at how upset he is. “Don’t say that.”

“It’s _true,_ ” says Murphy.

“You just miss them,” says Raven.

He’s talking too loud again, and he’s aware of it, but his face is hot and he — _yeah,_ he misses them, Raven, fuck you — “Don’t you? It was — it was yesterday, it was two days ago, and they _grew old and they died without us,_ we were supposed to —“

“You wanted to live on Earth in that little valley with your little plot of land and raise a garden with them, huh?”And maybe when she says it like that, it doesn’t sound so stupid, doesn’t sound so — hopeful, so hopeless.

“They fucked like rabbits,” says Murphy, and he sniffles. It’s just his drink. “There would’ve been a kid eventually.”

“Nothing with Emori?” Raven asks, and Murphy does not want to talk about her, or about that.

“I don’t have the right equipment for that,” he says. “You know me.”

Raven smirks at him, because he did kind of make a joke, and pours him another without being asked. He swallows it down without being asked, without thanking her. The burn feels good, maybe.

“Don’t you miss them?” he asks, because she never really answered him. “Monty, and Harper, and — it’s like Bellamy can’t even say her name. Like he would just as soon forget about her.”

“You can’t even say Shaw’s name,” Raven points out.

“That’s different,” Murphy says, a dismissal, discarding the image of Shaw dying from radiation under Clarke’s hands out of his mind. “He died normal. Not happy.”

“Normal?” Raven asks.

Murphy waves a hand, which isn’t an explanation. “ _You_ know,” he says. They’ve talked about this before.

“Yeah,” says Raven, and she sounds sad about it, instead of resigned. “Choking on your own vomit. Radiation. Getting shot. Getting floated. The regular ways.”

“I mean,” says Murphy, and it’s a half-attempt to make her feel better. “You know anyone else who died happy and old?”

Raven sighs. “I don’t know,” she says. “Jaha, maybe? He died in the bunker.”

Murphy makes a face. “Fuck him,” he says. “And I don’t think anyone died happy there. Also they ate his body.” He glances at her glass. “Another?” he offers her, reaching for the pitcher, ready to pour one out for both of them.

She pulls her own glass away, and then the pitcher out of his reach. “I think you’ve had enough,” she says, easy. It brings tears to his eyes, sudden, the way she — _cares,_ like that. Embarrassing.

“Fuck you,” he says, because it’s easier to deflect. “Don’t try to — it’s not like that,” he tries. “C’mon.”

“Are you crying, Murphy?” she asks, and the words are mocking, but she — it’s not — He turns his own face into his shoulder, wipes away what’s there.

“I’m a very emotional person,” he tells her, as deadpan as he can manage.

“I’m not going to let you do anything you’ll regret,” she tells him, even.

“Then tuck me in before everyone else gets home?” he asks, trying to mock her back, but it falls flat. Who knows how to hit where it hurts now, huh?

“Eat some bread,” says Raven, reaching back behind them and effectively stealing an entire platter of bread and sweets. “It’ll soak up the alcohol,” she says. “Go on.”

“They make it weird here,” he complains, but he tears off a hunk of bread and dips it in the oil in the middle of the platter, just to make her happy..

“Who’s the baby now?” Raven teases him.

Murphy just had a horrible thought. He must speak it into existence right now. “Fuck. God. You think Jordan had even eaten solid food before now? If he was raised on algae? No wonder he’s so fucked up.”

Raven looks stricken with this revelation. “Shut up,” she says, almost immediately. “We’re not thinking about it. He seems fine. Eat your bread.”

Murphy shuts up and eats his bread. He watches Raven hold onto her drink for a bit, and then he can’t stand the silence between them. It’s usually like that. “Tell me more about the green valley and the garden we would have together.”

“You’re really drunk, huh?” she asks. What, a man can’t be nostalgic for a planet he never got to really live on? In this economy?

“Yeah, well,” is his clever rebuttal to that. “It’ll make me feel better.”

Raven kind of smiles, and pushes her drink aside. “Yeah, okay,” she agrees. She starts laying it out for him. “You think we’d all live in one big house or have our own separate houses?”

Murphy huffs, almost in anger. “I never want to share a bathroom with Bellamy again. The fucking mess he made _this morning —_ “

Raven raises a hand for mercy. “I do _not_ want to hear about it,” she says, very quickly. It’s probably for the best.

“So,” Murphy says, moving on with it. “We’d have eight little houses, around a firepit.”

“Eight?” Raven asks. “Not four?” Not neatly paired up, like we’ve always been, since the Ring?

“You don’t want to room with Clarke,” he points out.

“Well,” says Raven, admitting to it. “No.”

“So eight little houses. A big firepit. And gardens, between the houses.”

“I _feel_ like you don’t know very much about gardening and how much sunlight plants need.” Teasing him, soft.

“Neither do you,” points out Murphy. “So shut up. Monty and Harper live together, and they’re gross and in love all the time,” a foregone conclusion, something that happens in every single one of the times that Murphy imagines their futures, “and they have a kid together, and we all raise it, along with Madi, right? Jordan can be — he’s fucking younger than Madi, imagine that, and she can be his big sister, and they play, like, soccer together, I don’t know what regular kids do —“ He kind of cuts himself off, remembering the soccer game that they played on Eligius together, and it was kind of a heady rush then, too.

Raven says, “Yeah?” to get him going again.

“I don’t know, I just want — I know it’s too late, but I just think — it was just my mom and me, right? There wasn’t anybody looking in, checking in on us, making sure she wasn’t fucking me up.” And she was. Fucking him up, that is. “Like, I just want them — Madi and Jordan, I guess — to have _more._ Than what I had. You at least had Finn, right? Someone else? I’d just want them to have — a whole family.” It takes a village to raise a child, and all that.

He hasn’t realized how much his face is — leaking, really, until Raven reaches across the table and touches his hand, the one that’s still holding his hunk of bread. Awkwardly, he shifts the bread to his other hand, and she holds his, her thumb pressing to his palm. It feels like his bones shift to accommodate her, to make room for her. “Hey,” she says. “Hey. You’ve got us now. We’re not going anywhere.”

“Yeah,” he says, and he sniffles loudly again. “You didn’t even have the Skybox to look after you.”

Raven snorts. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she says. “It’s fucking tragic. C’mon,” she says, sliding off her chair, easy, tugging him to his feet. “Let’s get you upstairs. Take off your shoes.”

They both get upstairs, and Raven needs help out of her dress, and Murphy unzips it for her, helps her slide it off her shoulders. It’s easy to do, something he’s done a hundred thousand times on the Ring, helped her get into or our of her brace, seen her brown skin, caught a glimpse of her boxers — She steps into softer sleep clothes, just a big, oversized shirt that was probably Bellamy’s at some point, her legs bare, and looks at him staring at her, open-mouthed, on the bed in their borrowed room.“C’mon,” she says, and pulls out another one of Bellamy’s shirts for him to sleep in, soft from years of comfortable use, still a little too big on him. She helps him untie his boot laces, helps unzip his fly and tug his pants down. He manages his shirt by himself, though he feels — too big, uncoordinated, by the alcohol. Her gaze lingers on his chest, at his double crescent-moon scars, and the words tumble out of him:

“God made me transsexual for the same reason that fruit is not already wine,” he says, struck with brilliance.

“Yeah?” Raven asks, amused. “And what reason is that?”

“So that humans might share in the act of creation.” He waves a hand. “You know,” he says. “The divine alchemy of the self,” like it’s obvious.

Raven straddles him then, and he sits up, still shirtless, to meet her, this unexpected gift in his lap. “You are so fucking stupid,” she says, and if he was wearing a shirt, he is sure she would be gripping him by the collar of it. “Kiss me,” she commands.

And he does; his lips crashing into hers, hers chapped and windburnt, his —

And if she touches his shoulder and presses him down into the bed —

Who is he but a man who lets the soft animal of his body love what it loves? He is the one who takes it out to green pastures, who sets it down to sleep beneath the skin of stars. This is his body, his body, his body, and —

It is her body, her body, and —

And what is that but love? But undivided love.

**Author's Note:**

> this was a prompt i took for t100fics-for-BLM! find more information at their card: t100fics-for-blm.carrd.com . you can have me write you a fic as well! all relevant info on that carrd
> 
> the transsexual quote at the end is by Julian K. Jarboe
> 
> let me know if you loved or hated this! i wrote it all in one sitting and then took a step back to spell-check and was like 'wow this is seven pages long'


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